CNN. Asked about its future, he said, "Well, I hope it's a bright one." But, while Turner thinks CNN has pro- grammed "too much" talk, he has no idea how to cure its ratings woes: "Qyite frankly; I'm not sure I have the answers." Privately; he is concerned about a general dumbing down that is taking place in the media, putting "DiSiprio"-he means Leonardo DiCaprio-"on the cover of Time. Obviously, it should be on the cover of People or Entertainment Weekly!" By the next morning, the man who confesses to a congenital inability to po- lice a secret was no longer restrained. Turner did not criticize the recent round of cutbacks at CNN, but he did criticize the parent company's growth target. This was impossible to achieve, Turner said, without doing harm to CNN's journalism. "I always wanted CNN to be the New York Times of the television business," he said, a little s'adly: A lthough the AOL Time Warner merger took effect only in January; there have already been some successes. As the largest individual shareholder in the conglomerate, Turner is enthusiastic about a new emphasis on coördination and synergy: Of Gerald Levin's man- agement over the past five years, Turner bluntly says, "The Time Warner divi- sions did not coöperate the way they should have. . . . I think he did a pretty marginal job of running the company:" Now, with roughly forty per cent of Americans using AOL to reach the In- ternet, AOL is vital in promoting each division of the company. In the eight months ending January 31st, for exam- ple, Pittman told Wall Street analysts, AO L had sold eight hundred thousand new subscriptions to Time Inc.'s differ- ent magazines. The company is in vari- ous businesses, Levin said at a confer- ence earlier this month, but one word united them: "subscriptions"-a total of a hundred and thirty million subscribers. Turner, however, is afraid that when journalistic divisions like CNN shrink corporate executives may try to "avoid doing stories that are critical of the big companies, like the oil companies and the automobile companies. It's not easy to do stories that are critical of G .E.- you know, nuclear-power-plant stories. When was the last time you saw stories on TV critical of G.E. or DuPont? Bet- 162 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 23 & 30,2001 OLD MR FORRESTER Old Mr. Forrester-light, light as a leaf: Brown, desiccated, and attached by just The thinnest stem to motion and the sun. He sat all day in the precious, vanishing warmth And watched his feet in black and shining shoes, And watched his blotched, unaspiring hands, And now and then the far heights of the mountains And meditated, perhaps, upon his body: That most familiar and disobedient thing, Which in time segments was his abject slave, Dressed as he willed, raised, lowered, hot or cold, But in the sweep, the arc disclosing itself: Altering with silent mutiny each particle The will asserted was his own: the hair, Changing without request its original color, The muscles, unauthorized, loosening their grip, The teeth deserting, the eyes treacherous, and The lazy blood Slack in its flowing and unpunishable. And meditated, perhaps, upon his soul- Which meant heaven knew what-the inner thing With which he had incuriously lived Until the prospect of its company On a trip into territory where this would be Presumably the Friend to Have, the Visé, The Contact, made him desire to cultivate An alien whose speech he did not know And the long residence of whose proximity Might make him now a sullen and suspicious Prospect for this belated amit)r. ter to stay away from the corporations- they're the sponsors. That's the danger." Turner, to be sure, does not talk about the embarrassments of his own tenure, including CNN's unceasing coverage of the O. J. Simpson murder case and trial. At another of his Harvard appear- ances-a session in which he was ques- tioned by Jones and several others for an hour and then stayed for an hour more as the six finalists for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting discussed their stories-Turner said, "I've already been fired, and I probably will be again shortly:" One of the Shorenstein Fellows rose and condescendingly suggested that Turner might follow the example of Henry Ford, who also left his job but who set up the Ford Foundation, which is "one of the most influential forces for the framing of issues in the countTJ You have a life - osephine acobsen and a future and can use your contacts-" "I am," Turner interrupted, and he mentioned his gift to the U.N. Founda- tion. "No other individual in the world is giving as much to the poor world as I am. I'm spending fifty million dollars in the United States, mostly on envir- onmental and family-planning causes. Ahhhhhhhh . . . I mean, family plan- ning is under attack You know, pro-lifers have got control of the White House. Roe v. Wade is hanging on by a thread. A woman's right to choose? They want to take that away. We're fighting global warming." He mentioned the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the dues payment to the U.N. ' d let me tell you what else I'm doing. I'm very close to making an announcement of a personal partner- ship through our foundation with public broadcasting to fund important docu-